Yale Law School Taken To Task

Hundreds Of Students Urge Action To Deal With The Dearth Of Members Of Minority Groups On The School's Faculty.

April 25, 2002|By JANICE D'ARCY; Courant Staff Writer

NEW HAVEN — Hundreds of Yale law school students have urged their dean to change hiring practices that have left one of the nation's highest-rated law schools with few faculty members of color.

``This is a problem because it negatively affects the intellectual and academic vigor at Yale law school,'' said Bob Hoo, the first of dozens of students who took to the microphone Tuesday night at the school to criticize the lack of diversity.

The meeting was the first public indication of increasing concern among Yale law students, and could be the start of self-evaluation for the school.

Dean Anthony Kronman called the students together after a petition was circulated -- which more than half of the student body signed -- that demanded that administrators address the fact that there are few minorities on the 47-member faculty. The protesting students also issued a series of suggestions on the school's recruiting, hiring and promotion procedures.

They seized on the facts that Yale law school has only three black tenured professors, and hasn't tenured a black professor in more than a decade and that there are no Latino tenured professors despite a student body that is about 10 percent Latino. They also said there are few faculty members who are other minorities or women.

Kronman offered a response that kept the meeting relatively subdued, but did not satisfy the critics. He agreed with the students, but said a solution wouldneed long-term consideration, rather than the swift action students demanded Tuesday.

In regard to the two main demands -- that administrators produce a plan to diversify staff by September and that the dean establish a student committee to oversee implementation -- he suggested that instead he would reflect on comments made at the meeting and write a report on them for distribution in the fall.

``This is a large, complicated and in many ways difficult subject,'' he said, ``There is no way in the world we could exhaust the subject or even map its geography in one session.''

The Yale debate emerges just as another Ivy League school is publicly involved with a diversity controversy. This month there was a mass protest at Harvard law school, and the university lost one of its most widely known African-American scholars, Cornel West.

If the public nature of the Yale debate persists it could be embarrassing to a school that prides itself on encouraging legal activism and progressive thought.

The students at Yale were well aware of timing their petition to the highly publicized Harvard situation. In their public statement before Tuesday's meeting, for instance, they urged the press to attend since it was scheduled ``within days of Cornel West's departure from Harvard.''

But Kronman pressed them Tuesday to tone down the rhetoric and instead look at the petition and the meeting as ``the start of a conversation.''